The accurate classification of brain tumors from MRI scans is important for the timely diagnosis and treatment planning process; however, previous state-of-the-art automatic image classification methods frequently struggle to balance performance with computational cost for clinical applications. In this study, we evaluated twenty lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models and eighteen Vision Transformers (ViT) models for multi-class brain tumor classification using a merged dataset of 17,933 MRI images from 4 categories (glioma, meningioma, pituitary tumors, and healthy brains). The study demonstrated that both groups of architectures can achieve state-of-the-art performance with EfficientNet-b0 (98.36 % accuracy, 4.01 M params) and Tiny-ViT-5M (98.41 % accuracy, 5.07 M params), ranking as the top-performing models for each category. The systematic comparison determined that the proposed lighter models have equivalent or greater performance than established lightweight frameworks, while offering computational advantages, such as MobileViT-xxSmall, which achieved outstanding performance (98.16 % accuracy) with fewer than 1 M parameters. Through benchmarking against fourteen other prior existing frameworks for brain tumor classification, we demonstrated that the top-performing lightweight models of this study maintain stable performances across all evaluation metrics (including precision, recall, and F1 score) and aim to mitigate key weaknesses of prior work, including dataset diversity and model complexity. The findings show very competitive performance across brain tumor classification, highlighting the promise of lightweight architectures to generate accurate and efficient diagnostic support for potential clinical deployment, particularly in low-resource healthcare environments where such efficiencies are vital. Moreover, this work provides useful knowledge that may assist in developing deployable artificial intelligence solutions in neuro-oncology settings.
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